Yes, he did it. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has just unveiled the 3G iPhone, doubling the handset's talk time in the process - and halving the price.
Last year, Jobs said Apple wouldn't connect the iPhone to 3G networks because of the communications technology's battery demands. Apple's clearly licked the problem: the new iPhone is …

@Ben Bufton

Worth it.

I think the prices are a big jump in the right direction. £159 for the 16GB is still £110 cheaper than I paid for the current 8GB one, and I can give this one to my missus, and she can upgrade to the 3G at her leisure.

@Mike Richards

@Ivan Headache

Are you complaining that your phone has to be able to call law enforcement? 911/999 etc.. I bet you use that all the time. I for one have used my camera phone on many many occasions because I know its there, most people forget. I do not however carry a seperate camera with me at all times..

I have used my camera to take pictures of; traffic accidents, burning buildings, criminal offences, acts of stupidity, Health and safety Violations, amazing hailstones, BSODs, Tourist Maps, stupid roadsigns, and even for small things, like an instore offer displayed on shelf that sounded too good to be true, it was, and didn't scan at checkout but they let me have it as I had the pic. oh and next time PC plod gets his taser out there will be pics of that too!

There is no excuse for not having a decent camera. virtually every other phone has one. apple just want to save something for the next release to squeeze more money for the next big phone!

And yet...

...still tied to 02 :(

Shame. A lot of businesses would love phones like these but probably have large contracts with other networks such as Vodafone or Orange. How does Apple expect to break into the business market or even the consumer market with deep penetration if you are forced to use a specific carrier?

@Webster Phreaky

"According to a just released report by Gartner Research, the Apple iPhony is in a dismal DISTANT Third Place in the World Wide Smart Phone market space behind Nokia and Research In Motion (Blackberry)"

Yes, but it got to that position in a year or so, and beat most of the established market (Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung etc).

Meh.

Still too expensive

Any price more than $0 on an expensive 24 month contract is taking the piss.

Also noteworthy is you *must* register and activate in store. They're doing this to prevent unlockers but rather than say this (and its a reasonable thing to say) they come out with a lame excuse that people actually want to register in-store.

£99 - 18 Month Contract

O2

Aside from the Pay Monthly plans mentioned above, they also offer Pay As You Go, 269 pounds for the handset, no contract, that sounds pretty good to me!

I also happen to agree with the previous poster re cameras on phones. If you actually care about photos you will never use a phone to take it. Even the Samsung phone with AF etc or any with limited optical zoom or the likes they are all still weak compared to an entry level compact (let alone even bridge camera). I've taken the rare photo with my camera phone at tourist exhibits some times just to take the piss, and then used a real camera after that.

Also Webster is a funny one, i hadn't paid attention to that many of his posts but its always amusing have a kid with excessive hormones running rampant on a site!

O2 free upgrade site up

O2's website is up.

iPhone is now available on Pay as You Go as well as corporate accounts, but for existing iPhone customers there's "free" upgrades for the top packages assuming that one agrees to a new 18-month contract and is £99 on the more affordable tarrifs.

i think A-GPS is better for use in areas where their are tall buildings, eg in central london my gps satnav gets confused every so often about which road i'm on and goes a bit haywire, with A-GPS this (apparently) doesn't happen

and looking at the o2 this morning price doesn't seem to be that unreasonable with good upgrade offers (even offering p&g)

Spot on Wonderkid...

I'm more than a little disappointed by yesterday's iPhone announcements to be honest. I was very much hoping for some more improvements beyond simply tagging on 3G and GPS; functions which are industry standard in every other "smartphone" on the market.

I was expecting a bumped up camera at the very very least. Apple are quick to big up the fact that with the 2.0 firmware and 3rd party blogging apps you'll be able to photoblog right from your phone, but there is no way 2mp is sufficient. Only in the most direct of sunlight do camera pics on the iPhone turn out with any quality, otherwise their grainy and dull and just generally poor quality. Add a flash to this and I think it would be much more appealing, any pics my mates or I take are usually on nights out; ever tried taking photos on a night out with an iPhone? Nightmare, as with any cameraphone with no flash, which is why it's bloody standard these days.

The only other "notable" "feature" on this new model aside from 3G and GPS is a non-recessed headphone jack. That's not a friggin' feature Apple, it's a correction.

No front facing camera? On a 3G phone? What?! Even if it was only a bloody VGA camera! One of the biggest initial attractions (and I say initial because it's a feature that's rightfully taken for granted in any 3G phone these days) of 3G phones was the ability to video conference on the go, how in the name of sweet sweet Jebus has this been left out? I can see no explanation for this at all other than half-assedness on Apple's part.

BUT. I think we're missing something; something which Apple will consider an important point : this is not the iPhone 2. It's the iPhone 1.5, it's what the iPhone 1 should've been off the bat.

Macworld 09 = iPhone 2, I'll bet then we'll see all the features that should've been in this newly announced model.

Will I upgrade from my current iPhone 1? Probably, but only if 02 here in the UK are gonna offer me that free upgrade. I don't mind renewing my contract, but if I have to pay a single penny extra then I'm not interested. I'm more interested in the 2.0 firmware than 3g, and I'd be more than happy to just stick with my iPhone 1 and upgrade the firmware at no extra cost.

From free

Carphone Warehouse are listing the new iPhone as being available from free dependent on tariff. The only thing that stops it being sold like any other phone now is that you can't buy it SIM free, at a higher price, and select the carrier of your choice.

It also looks as though buying over the web from Apple is a no-no anywhere and buying from an Apple Store in the UK is no longer an option either. So the only place you can buy one over here is from somewhere that can sign you up to a contract.

Devil SJ 'cos he's yet to realise how the phone market works in Europe. Oh well, onto the Eurostar to get an unlocked one from Belgium.

@Stuart Castle

Are you saying there wasn't already an established market for Apple products? It didn't matter what tat they pushed out they would get high sales for it and you know it.

On the other hand, this looks like a good offer, and makes it less insultingly stupid to buy an iPhone, a lot less. If it weren't for already owning an N95 8Gb I'd maybe even look at getting one, but I don't see the point shelling out for it :/

Anyway, no doubt it will do pretty well, even though the camera is still wank and the timings on it are bad. Maybe if Steve applied similar logic to other Apple products they would do better (in terms of computing market share)..?

Good product (it is really, although not as good as some would say), decentish price (a lot better than it was, although still too steep to be worth considering seriously), and 3G (we'll see how fast it is won't we?). Until it's tested I'll reserve full judgement, however, even as an MS fanboy, I'm giving Steve a halo. B+

@ AC

Where is the 3G Blackberry?

I have used 2 Blackberries a Nokia e61 etc and believe that the BB has the Nokia licked on most features. But as a frequent traveller I believe that I would be better served by an iPhone Saves on devices to carry etc.

I laugh at the fact though that everyone takes pot shots at Apple when RIM is also behind in the 3G race my BB also only has a 2MP camera. So what. If I am travelling this is fine if I want to take nice photos I get my DSLR out.

what a lot of fuss..

.. people make about the 'locking' of the phone.

For ages in the UK (I realise it differs elsewhere) even contract phones have often only been available 'locked' to a particular network, to facilitate subsidy. A Motorola Timeport I wanted to buy back in 2000 was only available on (then) Cellnet. Specific versions of Sony Ericsson phones are often only available through one network.

Have you ever used your phone for video calling? I've had a phone with front-facing camera for 3 years, and its just an annoyance when I hit the video-call option by accident.

MMS - ditto: and the phone has email, so far more flexible.

.. people are making about the GPS.

This new model has Assisted GPS - look it up.

.. tariffs.

I've not found these cheap contract deals in the UK either. Well, you can get them if you want to deal with T-Mobile's UK network. But I quite like having my phone work inside an office.

O2's deals, including the data and WiFi, seems pretty competitive to me. Even the upgrade option sounds fair (for the person on the 35 quid a month tariff - well, the person on the 45 quid tariff who gets an upgrade for free has paid £120 more over the year than you. So your £100 upgrade seems a better deal.)

But, it's a free world. You don't have to buy anything you don't want to. You don't even have to buy a new phone at all.

The published spec says it has "Assisted GPS"

So it has GPS with knobs-on ... go look up Assisted GPS. It uses mobile cell tower triangulation to assist the built-in GPS hardware when losing line-of-site or in trees or ... umm, cities.

The fact that this GPS works in conjunction with Google Maps is interesting ... and that does route planning and there is an open API for both Google and the iPhone and Apple are allowing developers to give away software via the iTunes "portal" and apparently without charging them (a 30% top-slice if developers charge for an app but 0% if they give it away) ... so expect a free or cheap satnav software sometime soon with automatic map updates thanks to Google Maps.

I found it interesting that in yesterdays 1 hour and 50 minute WWDC keynote only about 10 minutes was spent announcing the new iphone hardware and at least 1:30 was spent on the iphone 2.0 firmware changes, new apps and open SDK.

They have even allowed event-driven applications to act like background apps but without the security risks and battery overhead.

The linkage with dotMac / MobileMe is also very nice and will give lots of businesses "push email" without having to buy in to blackberry or even host additional blackberry servers .. just link to Exchange (yuck .. I'd rather use it against Zimbra).

It once again shows that Apple is still a software company that uses well designed (but standard) hardware to sell its software.

I'm a cheapskate so its still more than I want to pay (I get 1Gb data via a £10/month Three usb modem buts it lacks the iphone GUI 8-) but I will get hands-on with an iphone and then finally decide. I don't think people can slam the iphone (or any phone) without actually trying it out.

More on cameras in phones

Even with the Carl Zeiss lenses in mobiles, the image quality is still half of that in Carl Zeiss in compacts. My Sonic Ericsson photos are a joke compared to even a low end compact.

Regarding police, ive managed to use a 1.3mp image before off a camera phone (when i had no camera on me) over a traffic incident, and whilst the image wont reproduce a picasso, it will keep enough detail that you could get your convinction over it.

Re iPhone i am annoyed there is only PAYG and Contract lockins, I travel, a lot, and I can't rely on a single carrier or a single countrys SIMs, so i want a phone, that i'd be willing to pay a premium for, that allows me the flexbility i need.

I would like to buy an iPhone 3G, its web browsing and media functions trump any Windows Mobile or other Mobile platforms ability by far. And I have my Nikon D300 dSLR and Canon Powershot G9 compact if i care about photos!

@Bryan

As above, it DOES have GPS hardware in it.

TomTom have already stated that they have their software running on an iPhone. If GoogleMaps isn't usable for point to point directions (and I can't really see why it wouldn't be) then there's a pay for option there - my guess is it'll be ready to go next month when the AppStore goes live.

Wrong focus

It's not about why Apple has an amazing gizmo. It's about why the competition has been caught off-guard. Very obviously, the technology exists for all carriers and cell phone makers to offer hi-tech devices. Apple is the only one who chose to pump the money into research and development while the competition actually moved backwards.

Years ago, it was possible to purchase a phone running Linux. Rather than reduce costs and improve the features of Linux based phones, they vanished from the offering. Now, it's back to a choice between Apple or Microsoft.

Used an iPhone?

Yes. For about 2 days, before it went back in the box. I'll put the v2 software on it when it comes out, but I have a feeling it still won't be usable.

The keyboard is useless. It's semi-usable for typing actual words as it tries to guess what you're trying to type, but for passwords and other random sequences it guesses wrong 90% of the time. I had 10 goes at getting the iPhone on my wireless LAN and it screwed the WPA keyphrase up every time. And of course you can't put the password in a text file and paste it into the prompt.

You can't use a stylus on the screen. This means you're forever zooming in and out to make buttons etc. big enough to hit.

No copy and paste. How can any phone, let alone a supposedly 'smart' phone, be taken seriously without copy/paste?

No way to send files to it.

No To-Do application. Out of the box anyway, mine has one now...

Bluetooth is seriously crippled, I'm not sure why they even bothered.

It's a shame, because the interface makes it a really nice phone to use. The mute/volume/transfer to speaker etc. screen when you're in a call is by far the best I've come across.

C'mon, let's keep on whinging

'cos the more people there are whining and moaning about how crap the 3G iPhone is, the more chance of there being one in stock for me.

I've been holding out for the 3G iPhone announcement versus opting for an N95 to replace my N70. Turns out, it's not as well featured as the N95. It does appear, however, to have everything that I need from a phone. The 2MP camera's just like the N70 and that does me just fine. It will work with iTunes, unlike my N70, which is good because I like iTunes.

Now, I'm absolutely not an Apple fan-boi. But you know what, the iPhone is a NICE phone. So, once I've confirmed a few things, like how well it'll work with my hands-free kit in the car, I think I'm gonna get one.

Here's a question. How many copies of Nokia's first phone did they sell in 12 months?

@James Grinter

Saviors and Second Comings

I hear Obama's going to endorse the iPhone!

Empty promises and flashy bits FTW.

Makes ya wonder why Apple has managed to keep brand loyalists even when they could have built the iPhone this way for this price right at first instead of screwing over their customers three times: first for the high price, then cutting it down, then releasing a "new" model with the specs that were floated about for the first model. No "new" technology here, all this was available at the first drawing board.

Happy o2 iPhone Customer

I finally and reluctantly gave in to the iPhone bandwagon when o2 took £100 the phone a little while ago at the same time as there was a £100 cashback available on it via Quidco. Much as I deperately didn't want to give into the hype, frankly I wanted one for pure gadget value and an effective £69 I could just about cope with.

Much as I really wanted to be the next Apple cynic, as I struggle a bit with all the crap that comes out of those with prayer mats facing Cupertino, the phone is absolutely brilliant. I've had phones with all the features that this one has but generally they are a pain in the arse to use. Even the "king of email", Blackberry can't handle HTML email which is about as much use as tits on fish for anyone who ever gets important circular emails like product updates, which I would guess a lot of people do.

The fact is, I've never used mobile email, internet or even SMS as much as I have with this one.

Add to this, the fact that I've just had a text from o2 offering (i.e. I don't have to investigate or beg) an upgrade for £99 to the iPhone 3G on 11 July.

I knew this when I got it, but the EDGE or lack of it in the UK is pretty slow for browsing and is my only real quarrel with the current model, so I will be more than happy to hand over £99 for my new iPhone, particularly as CEX are currently paying £275 cash for the old ones unlocked.

This is a great product and very fair service from both Apple & o2. If you don't like it, try the following phones which I've also had.

Nokia N95 needs constant rebooting, charging and patience of a saint.

Blackberry Pearl has a keyboard considerably more annoying than a iPhone and that trackball drives me crazy. Email is actually not that great, e.g iPhone Yahoo push is quicker that it is, no HTML.

I've also used various Windows Mobile devices etc. The fact is that the iPhone has less of the "throw it across the room factor" than anything else available.

Nike Running App?

Have been a SE loyal for a long time now, but have to say that I think Apple have finally won me round with this. 16GB for £60 with a £45 contract when current £35 contract works out at at least £45 when you add in data usage. Seems alright to me!

One question I have though is if they have announced any plans to release a running application that uses the GPS? Nike+ with ability to map your route would be fantastic.

I suspect the other operators must be absolutely bricking it at the moment....!

And they decided to release it the week after my birthday - how considerate ;)

@IvanHeadache

My point was that its a feature that is used by some! just because you dont use it doesn't mean it is not important and wanted.

As for you and Mrs Headache if you want to carry two devices feel free, charge two sets of batteries take two bags with you on holiday, always look like a tourist, and grow eyes in the back of your head when in a bar then feel free.

I prefer one device in my pocket.

Perhaps you ought to try a sony cybershot camera, maybe the K810 3.2Mpix it has many controllable features several shooting modes good autofocus proper flash etc.. (the K850 5MP is crippled! avoid it)

New activation process?

I bet they've changed the activation process, otherwise you could get a free 8GB one on the £45 tariff, not bother activating it, Jailbreak it and stick your Voda / Tmob / orange / whatever PAYG sim in it...